Mega City Model

“The ideal Renaissance city, an idealized place and urban prototype, was an approximation of a perfect model completely fulfilled by the few buildings representing the Polis.

Conversely, the idea of a Chinese city is represented by a model where thousands of buildings stretch along street grids, grouped together seamlessly. The city is so vast that a possible border, a line of demarcation between the inside and the outside, is not even contemplated and can never be represented or photographed in full.

These macromodels constitute microcosms, the crystallized expression of a future decided elsewhere, and apparently as indisputable as they are inevitable.

There are 1.3 billion people in China. A population that is slowly decreasing, as it is in the West, but unlike the West, today only half the population is urbanized. According to estimates, over the next 20 years, 90% will move to cities. Assumptions, estimates, predictions. Maybe. But if it is accurate, more than 30 million people each year, for the next 20 years, will migrate from the countryside, turning from peasants to factory workers, occupying new homes, working in new industrial plants, frequenting new places. Annual construction volumes will rise to 7 billion cubic meters, for a total – by 2035 – of about 140 billion new cubic meters. The equivalent of a new Europe or North America. In the coming 20 years, China will produce what the Old World produced in 2,000 years and the New World in 200 years. A rapid urbanization and building 100 times greater than that of the Old World and 10 times that of the New World. We are spectators, often unaware, of this hypertrophic growth that once again leaps by more than one order of magnitude. 2000, 200, 20 years to build the ‘New World’. Algebra.